Supporting Patients by Family Education in Psychotic Illness: A Prospective Cohort Study

Background:

A lack of education, resources, and support for family carers of young adults with psychotic illnesses leaves them ill-equipped to support their loved one. Often family carers are excluded from the discharge planning process or are unaware of how to support of their loved one in community. Although best practice documents champion family involvement the implementation of these guidelines is challenge and families are often excluded from care.There is evidence of the disparity between best practice documents and true practice in the literature.

Family inclusion also addresses the impact of psychotic disease on the family's functioning and mental health. Psychotic illness (e.g., anosognosia, paranoia) can interfere with relational health and the natural maturation of family relationships over time. Families face extreme challenges when supporting a young adult with psychotic illness including social isolation, likely because their typical social supports are unable to relate to their situation, prompting them to seek support with those who share their situation (i.e., family support groups). Family carers, even in the face of these hardships, work with great tenacity toward improving service user stability in community.

There is a lack of high-quality effectiveness research showing longitudinal evidence for treatment effects on the carer and the young person in family psychoeducation groups. For example, one study provided a family intervention that was primarily knowledge- and support-based. These researchers used a pre-post design to assess the mental health knowledge, but did not assess long-term effectiveness of the group, overall family functioning, and functioning of the service user.

The intent for this longitudinal pre-post study is to evaluate the effect of skills-based educational programming for family carers supporting young adults admitted to or discharged from hospital with psychosis of any etiology on 6-month and 24-month service user readmission rates and service user/family functional indexes. The investigators hypothesize that system integration of a program which delivers early support for the family carers by way of an educational intervention beginning prior to or shortly after hospital discharge may reduce family burden as well as improve short- and long-term patient outcomes. To the investigators' knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate effectiveness of a family carer skills-based education intervention within a public healthcare system.